@Mirabai someone has to renovate it, otherwise these beautiful old buildings would collapse. It takes a long time if you do it properly as everything needs to be done by hand, and I never heard of anyone, including the royal family, who had enough money to do it all in 1 go, and you need to repaint and do spot repairs externally every other year just for maintenance. And then there are the gardens. As an example, we had 3 joiners working for us exclusively, often 50 hours weeks, for 2 years just to restore the windows (all 45 of them), the floors, the doors, and the wall panelling. The wall panelling in the drawing room alone took 4 months to make and install, and another 6 weeks to decorate and install a copy of the original chinoiserie wallpaper, which was printed bespoke to fit the panels. All this after it took 4 lime experts 2 months to repair the lath ceiling and to redraw the plaster covings by hand. All that after another 4 months to repair joists, repoint the walls, lay new floorboards, restore windows and fix secondary glazing, and to open up and repair and line the 2 chimneys (15m high, from lower groundfloor, there are 15 chimney chambers and fireplaces all together, every single one needed significant work). This one room alone cost about 80k to restore. There are 25 rooms in total, admittingly many are much smaller, but then you have extra costs for bathrooms and kitchen, and of course repointing and electrics. We had 5 miles of cables put down in the house, there are 7 wifi router outlets, there are 8 different heating zones, 2 boilers, 1 heatpump, underfloor heating in the kitchen and about 35 massive 6-column radiators. Even Buckingham Palace has a timeframe of 10 years for repairs, but I bet it will take 20, and the royals are turning the heating down. It's a labour of love to renovate an old property, and you will never (or should never) put the heating on 24 hours/day to 21 degrees. These houses were built to be heated 1 room at a time, and that's what we try to do. We heat the kitchen when we are in, we heat the bedrooms for 1 hour before getting up and before going to bed. We sit in front of a fire in the snug. Drawing rooms are summer rooms, we don't heat them in the winter, nor do we heat our 13m high, 30 square meter big entrance hall and side hall - that would just be like burning 10 pound notes. I wouldn't do it if I was a billionaire. There is always a warm room, but most of the house is about 13 or even 10 degrees in winter (the heating comes on when it goes below 10 degrees to prevent frost damage). The boilers are so strong though, and the heating zones so small, that it takes minutes to heat up a room when you need to.